Casos de aplicaciones empresariales de Web Mapping y SIG Libre

La incorporación Software Libre para Geomática (FOSS4G), para la explotación de Información Geoespacial en Sistemas de Información (SI) empresariales es una tendencia inexorable. Aunque estas tecnologías se están difundiendo con rapidez en entornos de empresas especializadas, Universidades, Administraciones Públicas y Centros Tecnológicos, todavía es algo incipiente en grandes empresas, especialmente en aquellas no directamente relacionadas con las tecnologías de los SIG. El objetivo de esta presentación será mostrar cómo se está consiguiendo introducir el software de SIG libre en el mundo empresarial, con tres casos de éxito. El primero es un desarrollo tradicional para una compañía tipo ‘utility’ donde el cliente define una funcionalidad y contrata su desarrollo. El segundo es un modelo de contratación de servicios. La tercera es una aplicación para la administración pública. En los tres casos, el uso de software libre ha permitido ofrecer soluciones exitosas para los requerimientos de los clientes (tanto funcionales como de rendimiento), y óptimas en coste

LEGENDiary: web 2.0 y app móvil

LEGENDiary es un geoportal 2.0 que permite compartir y explorar las leyendas y cuentos característicos de las ciudades de una manera dinámica y colaborativa. Muchas veces las leyendas forman parte de la historia y cultura de nuestros pueblos o ciudades, LEGENDiary nos permite conocerlas según el territorio donde se ubican. La iniciativa promueve nuevas formas de conocer y explorar el territorio, en general, y las leyendas y cuentos de nuestros pueblos y ciudades, en particular. Un proyecto que permite a los usuarios interactuar y ser protagonistas de esta experiencia. El proyecto parte inicialmente de un contexto español, y se trata de un proyecto hecho a medida de todas aquellas personas interesadas y con curiosidad en compartir, conocer y explorar las leyendas en el territorio. La combinación de las Tecnologías de la Información Geográfica y las Tecnologías 2.0 es el escenario donde surge LEGENDiary, aportando la componente geográfica a las leyendas y cuentos de los pueblos y ciudades en un contexto colaborativo. La iniciativa se lanza el día 16 de noviembre de 2011 en formato concurso con motivo del Día Internacional de los Sistemas de Información Geográfica (GISDay). Para llevar a cabo la aplicación se han utilizado dos librerías Javascript (Leaflet y jQuery) de código abierto y gratuito que permiten crear de forma rápida y ligera aplicaciones de mapas interactivos a través de navegadores web (de escritorio y móvil). Como mapa base se ha utilizado Open Street Map.LEGENDiary es una iniciativa del Servicio de SIG y Teledetección (SIGTE) de la Universidad de Girona en colaboración con el Departamento de Geografía y la Facultad de Turismo de la misma universidad, y con elapoyo del Hotel Llegendes de Girona

Interoperability for eLearning Service Management and Provision

Learning Objects offer flexibility and adaptability for users to request personalised information for learning. There are standards to guide the development of learning objects. However, individual developers may customise these standards for serving different purposes when defining, describing, managing and providing learning objects, which are normally stored in heterogeneous repositories. Barriers to interoperability hinder sharing of learning services and subsequently affect quality of instructional design as learners expect to be able to receive their personalised learning content. All these impose difficulties to the users in getting the right information from the right sources. This paper investigates the interoperability issues in eLearning services management and provision and presents an approach to resolve interoperability at three levels.

Moving on. Where should the university map collection be going?

This paper argues for the importance of retaining a map library presence on UK university campuses at a time when many are under threat of closure, and access to geospatial data is increasingly moving to web-based services. It is suggested that the need for local expertise is undiminished and map curators need to redefine themselves as geoinformation specialists, preserving their paper map collections, but also meeting some of the challenges of GIS, and contributing to national developments in the construction of distributed geolibraries and the provision of metadata, especially with regard to local data sets.

Norms-based simulation for personalised service provision

User interfaces have the primary role of enabling access to information meeting individual users' needs. However, the user-systems interaction is still rigid, especially in support of complex environments where various types of users are involved. Among the approaches for improving user interface agility, we present a normative approach to the design interfaces of web applications, which allow delivering users personalized services according to parameters extracted from the simulation of norms in the social context. A case study in an e-Government context is used to illustrate the implications of the approach.

A conceptual life event framework for government-to-citizen electronic service provision

In recent years, life event approach has been widely used by governments all over the world for designing and providing web services to citizens through their e-government portals. Despite the wide usage of this approach, there is still a challenge of how to use this approach to design e-government portals in order to automatically provide personalised services to citizens. We propose a conceptual framework for e-government service provision based on life event approach and the use of citizen profile to capture the citizen needs, since the process of finding Web services from a government-to-citizen (G2C) system involves understanding the citizens’ needs and demands, selecting the relevant services, and delivering services that matches the requirements. The proposed framework that incorporates the citizen profile is based on three components that complement each other, namely, anticipatory life events, non-anticipatory life events and recurring services.

Soil food web properties explain ecosystem services across European land use systems

Intensive land use reduces the diversity and abundance of many soil biota, with consequences for the processes that they govern and the ecosystem services that these processes underpin. Relationships between soil biota and ecosystem processes have mostly been found in laboratory experiments and rarely are found in the field. Here, we quantified, across four countries of contrasting climatic and soil conditions in Europe, how differences in soil food web composition resulting from land use systems (intensive wheat rotation, extensive rotation, and permanent grassland) influence the functioning of soils and the ecosystem services that they deliver. Intensive wheat rotation consistently reduced the biomass of all components of the soil food web across all countries. Soil food web properties strongly and consistently predicted processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic locations, and they were a better predictor of these processes than land use. Processes of carbon loss increased with soil food web properties that correlated with soil C content, such as earthworm biomass and fungal/bacterial energy channel ratio, and were greatest in permanent grassland. In contrast, processes of N cycling were explained by soil food web properties independent of land use, such as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and bacterial channel biomass. Our quantification of the contribution of soil organisms to processes of C and N cycling across land use systems and geographic locations shows that soil biota need to be included in C and N cycling models and highlights the need to map and conserve soil biodiversity across the world.

Collaboration model for SSMEnetUK: a service science perspective

This paper aims to design a collaboration model for a Knowledge Community - SSMEnetUK. The research identifies SSMEnetUK as a socio-technical system and uses the core concepts of Service Science to explore the subject domain. The paper is positioned within the concept of Knowledge Management (KM) and utilising Web 2.0 tools for collaboration. A qualitative case study method was adopted and multiple data sources were used. In achieving that, the degree of co-relation between knowledge management activities and Web 2.0 tools for collaboration in the scenario are pitted against the concept of value propositions offered by both customer/user and service provider. The proposed model provides a better understanding of how Knowledge Management and Web 2.0 tools can enable effective collaboration within SSMEnetUK. This research is relevant to the wider service design and innovation community because it provides a basis for building a service-centric collaboration platform for the benefit of both customer/user and service provider.

Interpreters’ perception of linguistic and non linguistic factors affecting quality: a survey through the World Wide Web

This paper will present and discuss the results of an empirical study on perception of quality in interpretation carried out on a sample of 286 interpreters across five continents. Since the 1980’s the field of Interpreting Studies has been witnessing an ever growing interest in the issue of quality in interpretation both in academia and in professional circles, but research undertaken so far is surprisingly lacking in methodological rigour. This survey is an attempt to revise previous studies on interpreters’ perception of quality through the implementation of new Information Technology which allowed us to administer a traditional research tool such as a questionnaire, in a highly innovative way; i.e., through the World Wide Web. Using multidimensional scaling, a perceptual map based upon the results of the manner in which interpreters ranked a list of linguistic and nonlinguistic criteria according to their perception of importance in the interpretative process,was devised.

Towards conceptualizing reverse service supply chains

Purpose – Recognizing the heterogeneity of services, this paper aims to clarify the characteristics of forward and the corresponding reverse supply chains of different services. Design/methodology/approach – The paper develops a two-dimensional typology matrix, representing four main clusters of services according to the degree of input standardization and the degree of output tangibility. Based on this matrix, this paper develops a typology and parsimonious conceptual models illustrating the characteristics of forward and the corresponding reverse supply chains of each cluster of services. Findings – The four main clusters of service supply chains have different characteristics. This provides the basis for the identification, presentation and explanation of the different characteristics of their corresponding reverse service supply chains. Research limitations/implications – The findings of this research can help future researchers to analyse, map and model forward and reverse service supply chains, and to identify potential research gaps in the area. Practical/implications – The findings of the research can help managers of service firms to gain better visibility of their forward and reverse supply chains, and refine their business models to help extend their reverse/closed-loop activities. Furthermore, the findings can help managers to better optimize their service operations to reduce service gaps and potentially secure new value-adding opportunities. Originality/value – This paper is the first, to the authors ' knowledge, to conceptualize the basic structure of the forward and reverse service supply chains while dealing with the high level of heterogeneity of services.

TOWARD SEMANTIC WEB SERVICES AS MVC APPLICATIONS: FROM OWL-S VIA UML

OWL-S is an application of OWL, the Web Ontology Language, that describes the semantics of Web Services so that their discovery, selection, invocation and composition can be automated. The research literature reports the use of UML diagrams for the automatic generation of Semantic Web Service descriptions in OWL-S. This paper demonstrates a higher level of automation by generating complete complete Web applications from OWL-S descriptions that have themselves been generated from UML. Previously, we proposed an approach for processing OWL-S descriptions in order to produce MVC-based skeletons for Web applications. The OWL-S ontology undergoes a series of transformations in order to generate a Model-View-Controller application implemented by a combination of Java Beans, JSP, and Servlets code, respectively. In this paper, we show in detail the documents produced at each processing step. We highlight the connections between OWL-S specifications and executable code in the various Java dialects and show the Web interfaces that result from this process.

Improving data perturbation testing techniques for Web services

The widespread use of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web services in commercial software requires the adoption of development techniques to ensure the quality of Web services. Testing techniques and tools concern quality and play a critical role in accomplishing quality of SOA based systems. Existing techniques and tools for traditional systems are not appropriate to these new systems, making the development of Web services testing techniques and tools required. This article presents new testing techniques to automatically generate a set of test cases and data for Web services. The techniques presented here explore data perturbation of Web services messages upon data types, integrity and consistency. To support these techniques, a tool (GenAutoWS) was developed and applied to real problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The concept of e-service from a social interaction perspective

Today’s e-services are complex phenomenon consisting of several different e-services linked together. The e-services are provided by IT systems and presented to customers through user interfaces. Within web design research criteria are laid out for the design of good user interfaces, but one problem is that these analyses are performed without a service focus. This lack of service focus can result in the designed user interfaces providing indistinct service concepts, especially where several e-services are intertwined with each other.In order to design IT system interfaces, we have to be clear about which e-services are provided by the IT system and how these e-services are related to each other. This paper presents a framework for the analysis of user interfaces in terms of focused e-service, service environment and two types of intertwined e-services; related e-services and interrelating e-services. The analyses are exemplified by an Internet based e-marketplace. The paper discusses how the framework can be combined with ordinary web design criteria and how it can be used for e-service development.

Transparent Fault Tolerance for Web Services based Architectures

Service-based architectures enable the development of new classes of Grid and distributed applications. One of the main capabilities provided by such systems is the dynamic and flexible integration of services, according to which services are allowed to be a part of more than one distributed system and simultaneously serve different applications. This increased flexibility in system composition makes it difficult to address classical distributed system issues such as fault-tolerance. While it is relatively easy to make an individual service fault-tolerant, improving fault-tolerance of services collaborating in multiple application scenarios is a challenging task. In this paper, we look at the issue of developing fault-tolerant service-based distributed systems, and propose an infrastructure to implement fault tolerance capabilities transparent to services.

Performance Analysis of a Semantics Enabled Service Registry

Service discovery is a critical task in service-oriented architectures such as the Grid and Web Services. In this paper, we study a semantics enabled service registry, GRIMOIRES, from a performance perspective. GRIMOIRES is designed to be the registry for myGrid and the OMII software distribution. We study the scalability of GRIMOIRES against the amount of information that has been published into it. The methodology we use and the data we present are helpful for researchers to understand the performance characteristics of the registry and, more generally, of semantics enabled service discovery. Based on this experimentation, we claim that GRIMOIRES is an efficient semantics-aware service discovery engine.